Not every piece of Dallas food news needs its own headline, but stacked together, this week’s smaller stories add up to a pretty full picture of where the city’s eating and drinking scene is headed. A few closings, a few openings, and a couple of anniversary parties worth showing up for.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Every August, Dallas hands you a reason to finally book the table you’ve been putting off. DFW Restaurant Week turns 30 this year, running from Preview Weekend on August 6 through the final stretch on September 7, and more than 150 restaurants across the Metroplex are offering prix fixe menus built specifically for the occasion. Two-course lunches run $29, three-course dinners land at $49 or $59, and a handful of restaurants are offering $99 Signature Experience dinners with an extra course thrown in. About 20 percent of what you spend goes to the North Texas Food Bank or, for restaurants in Tarrant County, Lena Pope.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Ask most chefs where they learned to cook and you get a story about culinary school, or a mentor, or some line cook who showed them how to hold a knife. Ask Tiffany Derry, and the answer has always been her mother. On August 23, that answer gets a kitchen of its own.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a reason the French press has outlasted every countertop gadget that’s tried to replace it. No pods, no paper filters, no app to sync. Just coarse grounds, hot water, and a few minutes of patience. It’s the closest thing coffee has to a dumb-simple machine, and that simplicity is exactly why it makes such a good cup.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Bill and Lynn Gross opened their first hamburger stand in a converted fire station on Central Expressway in the early 1980s. That detail tends to get mentioned in passing whenever Chip’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers comes up, which is a shame, because it explains a lot about why the place still looks and feels the way it does more than forty years later: built for a crowd, built to move fast, built with the sort of bones that outlast whatever’s trendy that decade.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
We already told you the festival was coming back. What nobody’s told you yet is what’s actually new on the shelves this year, and that’s the part worth planning a grocery trip around.
The short version: Central Market is running its Hatch celebration from August 5 through August 18, with two free in-store events bookending the season, and a genuinely different product lineup than last year’s. The chain has been doing this since a single pallet of peppers sold out in ten minutes at the Austin store back in August 1995, and thirty-one years in, they’ve apparently decided the answer to “what else can we do with a chile” still hasn’t run dry.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Thirty years ago, a handful of Dallas restaurants agreed to knock a little off the check in exchange for sending a cut to a food bank. Nobody involved could have guessed it would still be running three decades later, or that it would grow into the second-longest-running restaurant week in the country. This week it did exactly that, officially kicking off its 30th year on August 10, with more than 175 restaurants across five counties taking part.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Start on Preston Road in North Dallas and drive north for twenty minutes, and you’ll pass through one of the more unexpected food corridors in the metroplex. It doesn’t advertise itself. There’s no sign, no branded district, no banner year hung on it by a chamber of commerce. It’s just four restaurants, spread between North Dallas and Plano, all cooking from the same general stretch of the map: the old Silk Road, where China, Central Asia, and the Middle East blur together on a plate.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
